1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to manufacturing patterned media and, in particular, to an improved system, method, and apparatus for patterned media disk nanoimprinting and a related disk drive architecture for head positioning.
2. Description of the Related Art
In future hard disk drives, it is expected that all magnetic media having an areal density greater than 1 Tb/in2 will require patterned media. Known manufacturing processes for making patterned media rely on fabrication of a single, complete master that is replicated many times to create whole replicas. Upon deposition of magnetic material, the replicas become actual patterned media disks that are used in reading and writing information. Typically, the replication process relies on “nanoimprinting” or stamping. The patterned surface on the master is used to imprint on a polymer on an imprinted substrate. The pattern created in the polymer is then permanently transferred to the imprinted substrate using conventional manufacturing processes such as wet and dry etching, metal lift-off, etc. It is also common to form several whole stampers from the single master and create many replicas from each stamper.
Due to the small feature sizes (smaller than 25 nm), the masters will likely have to be fabricated by using high resolution e-beam lithography. E-beam lithography is a very precise but slow process that may require hundreds of hours to generate masters. This represents a major portion of the time and cost needed to create masters. In addition, mastering processes that require this much time may suffer from overall, e-beam system instability over the long periods of time and may therefore be unmanufacturable even if the cost associated with lengthy mastering times was affordable. Thus, an improved solution for manufacturing patterned media would be desirable.